# dumb questions *The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 14 Jul 1997* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Alastair Reynolds *14 Jul 1997, 08:18* Dear all I enjoyed Wolfe's remarks and I'm glad to see he wasn't giving too much away. Not so much a dumb question, as a dumb observation, but something which bothered me slightly was the timescale since the Whorl's construction. If I remember rightly, it was somewhere between 300 or 400 years. To me this just didn't seem long enough for everything concerning the Whorl's origin and nature and purpose to have become so hopelessly garbled, although of course we've had such things as the Cargo Cult spring up in less time than Wolfe allows. A minor and debatable point though. One of my favorite moments in the sequence was the part where the floater tries to prevent itself being driven against the spin of the Whorl ("vector unacceptable") but is forced to do so anyway, and ends up drifting away from the Whorl's surface. Brilliant that! al ---